(2) End up supporting two revision systems, because you can't ditch the old one without destroying your software's history.
It depends on how you play it. Git is capable of importing CVS/SVN history. I've never tried it, but since CVS essentially has a linear development line for each branch I don't think this is technically difficult to achieve.
If it's a commercial tool, it's not that hard to merge all your branches (resolving the conflicts is not important) and then write a script which exports all of your release labels/tags from your existing revision control system into a single flat history in the new system, and then recreate all the branches ready for development to resume.
But it's certainly better to choose the right system up front. And I agree that it's a mistake for people to migrate without a long-term business case being made; but if that case is there, then there's no dispute.
It looks a bit like you're trying to summarize a very complex issue into a few soundbites.
The biggest cost you're going to have with your source control package is the initial setup.
This depends very much on the project. The initial setup cost of the SCM package will be pretty close to zero if everyone is using it from the start and is familiar with how it works.
The costs of revision control depend very much on the system used, and how mature the software development processes and methodologies are (purchasing the tool, installing it, and sending an email around to say "use it" are not sufficient to create a stable SCM environment), and how well the tool integrates with those processes. I would say that Clearcase is an example of a system which costs very little when you set it up initially, but which will consume a considerable amount of resources to keep it running and make sure that people don't screw it up. Subversion and Mercurial are less expensive in that respect, but Subversion will creak on a very large project with lots of branching and merging, and the inability to track merges is a real downer for any serious project (although I know they've fixed it lately). Git is technically far superior to Mercurial or Subversion, but the learning curve and the complexity of the tool - some stuff should be obvious just isn't - will increase costs when people spend ages trying to work out what just happened, or how to do what they want.
The tool that squares all of these circles the best, to me, is Bitkeeper. There is a cost, but once you understand the business case behind tools like this you will see that the commercial tools are often very cheap considering what they can do for you. Unfortunately, a lot of software development managers still regard SCM as an unfortunate nuisance that they are forced to deal with, rather than something that enables, complements, and enhances a smoothly run project.
The idea that the initial setup of an SCM is the biggest cost is quite easy to disprove. Just visit a site where people have deployed Clearcase and they don't understand how to use it, and you'll see what I mean.
The biggest benefit you're going to get from your source control package is going to be minimizing that cost.
I'm sorry, but this remark is nonsensical. The biggest benefit from deploying a source control package is minimizing the cost of that deployment ? That makes no sense.
There are many huge benefits to revision control. Change control and tracking, build reproducibility, automated merge management, parallel development, etc etc etc. Those are all things which save money and/or allow you to more easily manage large software projects which in turn allow you to compete. A poor choice in revision control can cause you to lag behind your competitors. It's a critical decision for a software project. It's different in the open source world, but since you're talking about people getting paid to write code I assume that is not what you are talking about.
Choose any of the modern source control packages and just get on with what you're being paid to do: write code.
Bad or ill-informed choices, particularly a choice based on the initial setup cost, will inhibit your ability to write code. But you are absolutely right if you mean that the tool should be essentially transparent, until the day comes when you need it's capabilities.
Which leads me back to a favourite point of mine. Why bother with the stupid, expensive and badly maintained machines in the first place ?
Here in the UK, you go to vote. They give you a piece of paper with the candidates on it. You go to a private booth and you write "X" beside the one you want. The nationwide results of the entire election are known within 24 hours of the polls closing. During the count, all of the elected representatives are permitted to attend and observe the count taking place, a process which is done in their full view. Votes which are disputed, ie not marked clearly with an X, are agreed on by the electoral officer in conjunction with the candidates present. If the candidates dissent from the unanimous view of what the ballot paper was declaring, then it goes to court.
I just do not know why you guys have to make a simple thing so complicated. Hanging chads, dimpled chads, improperly aligned machines, counting errors which may or may not be noticeable. People queueing for >30 minutes to vote. These are all the signs of a tin-pot democracy. You cannot call yourself a champion of democracy if you fail to legislate and invest for the democratic process to operate properly.
A machine that reads/speaks or writes/marks a paper ballot is invaluable to help the mobility or visually impaired and the illiterate and it can reduce costs in multi-precinct polling places or in polling places that use more than one language.
Assuming that the machine is incapable of error in all cases, which is close to being an impossibility.
A separate vote-tally machine can greatly speed up the vote count.
So why do American elections seem to take so long before the result is known ?
However, you must have a human-readable piece of paper, plastic, or something else we call a ballot in case the vote need to be recounted by hand, and this ballot must be examinable by the voter before he makes his vote official.
If you need to have a ballot in order to have confidence in the result, then why bother with electronic voting in the first place ? What are the criteria for discarding the electronic result and counting the ballots instead ? And how do you get confidence that a software bug or interference will not result in an incorrect vote being recorded for the electronic count, even though the correct vote is recorded on paper ?
Yeah, a carbon tax would do a good job of stopping power companies from ever building more power plants, limiting supply, thus since our demand is not increasing, the rates are going to go up, making all of our electricity more expensive.
That's right. The cost is being held artificially low because the price of keeping the air clean isn't being factored in.
It's not hard to go looking for examples of injustice, eg the Magdalene Laundries, an equivalent to what Scientology calls the RPF. Like Scientology, it appears that the RC church in Ireland essentially used slave labour as a source of revenue.
If you listen to hardcore Catholics talking about Padre Pio, miracles, and all the rest of it, you're only slightly less crazy than the Scientology idiots. If you want examples of avoiding justice and manipulating the legal system, you only have to look at how the church dealt with priests who were involved in paedophilia or other horrors; they deliberately moved priests around in order to avoid getting them caught, and they did not hand them over to the authorities - just like Scientology did not hand over those complicit in Lisa McPherson's death.
Of course, Catholicism does not require you to pay a fee to see the scripture. Anyone can freely copy, edit and recirculate their texts. Catholicism, in this respect, is not a scam. In many communities here in Ireland individual priests have actually worked to make their communities better and, during times when not many people were educated (or in possession of the right to vote) they were the leaders of the community.
No, because other devices are banned as well, not just cellphones. Anyway, why would the airlines concern themselves with the inability of cellphone base stations to handle this supposed problem ?
It does seem unlikely that a cellphone would knock out the avionics computer, especially considering that the computer has to deal with all kinds of more exotic radiation sources when it's higher up in the atmosphere. I'd be surprised if avionics equipment were not surrounded by a faraday cage to start with.
Over here, the newspaper ads (and Ebay) are full of Nintendo Wii's being sold for double the market price. I suspect that a significant number of the Wiis sold in the three months prior to Christmas have gone to people who are holding them back and taking advantage of those who will pay any price to get one before Christmas.
I suspect after Christmas the price on the Wii will collapse, and the shortages will magically disappear.
CDs are convenient that you can play carpet hockey with them and still get a reasonable output, but that "error correction" is just approximating and filling gaps.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG.
"Error correction" means just that - the errors are corrected. Which means that once the process is complete, you get a datastream without any errors in it.
It is not error interpolation. I don't know whether the CD standard mandates that interpolation must take place if an erroneous stream is passed through - somehow I doubt it.
It's a shame that people are putting out such unmitigated nonsense.
"Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs,
Compared with MP3 players, this is true. But then again, vinyl falls down on that one.
and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs.
"Sound better" is a purely subjective concept, so in that respect it is true.
What LP quite objectively and measurably cannot do is accurately reproduce a recorded sound with ruler-flat frequency response, unmeasurable wow and flutter, and no surface noise, scratches or hisses.
Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war.
If they're encouraged to do it on CDs, then why wouldn't they do it on LPs as well to get the same benefit ?
Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.
Making a sweeping statement about the standard of reproduction of an audio medium based on the treatment that some recording companies give to some types of CD is really pushing the boat out. CDs can sound very very bad, but that is only if the record companies choose to allow them to do so. LPs can also sound very very bad, given the fact that they degrade each time they are played, catch dust and so on, ignoring the measurable crapness of their audio reproduction. Until relatively recently all recording tapes had to be heavily compressed at the low end in order to ensure they would play properly on home record decks and to ensure that the cutting lathe would not overheat.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
The author obviously never heard of "frequency response" or "noise floor"; the quiet sounds that manage to make it onto an LP recording are masked by the surface noise and distortion inherent in a mechanical pickup being dragged through stamped bits of plastic.
In the old days of cassette tapes, I could throw all my tapes in a big pile and still be fairly confident they would play (unless I left them out in the sun or something).
Yeah, but how many times did you suffer from chewed tape ? I've an old cassette tape here (the soundtrack for Kubrick's "The Shining") which actually appears to suffer from sticky-shed syndrome, ie the binding on the tape is sticky and it clings to the heads on the way past.
The problem with tapes and LPs is that playing them involved mechanical contact, so each time you listen to them you're wearing away the underlying media. Eventually tapes will degrade or even snap, LPs degrade continuously and can be warped or otherwise damaged if they're not properly stored. CD guarantees that if you handle and store the medium properly and keep it in it's case when not in use, it will last a lifetime and still play as good as it did the day it was bought. LP and tape cannot provide the same guarantee.
Maybe music piracy wouldn't be so prevalent if CDs were more durable.
Oh nonsense, there is no widespread perception that CDs are not durable. Music piracy exists because people don't want to pay for their music.
Also, they were mostly encoded at the studio in 16 bit,
That's not what the problem was. CD is 16-bit anyway. I have some great-sounding CDs from the early 1980s which recorded and mastered digitally, they're still fantastic.
I remain to be convinced that anyone can perceive a difference in quality between 16 bit/44.1khz and the higher bitrates and sampling rates available these days. It should be pretty easy to prove - rip the audio from an SACD, dither it down to 16bit/44.1khz, and do a double-blind test to see if a difference can be perceived.
Better than tapes, but not as good as records on a decent hi-fi.
Records have never sounded remotely good to those of us who like our music without lots of scratches, pops, ticks and surface noise in it.
It comes back to the overriding question. Why don't they show their ideas in public ? Instead they run away and hide. They won't explain how it works. They didn't publish their ideas in a scientific journal, they published in the mass media.
Do any other slashdotters feel, like myself, that this device is a bit of a damp squib given that FTP is somewhat obsolete ? HTTP provides upload as well as download capabilities, and in any tests I've done I get the same download speed as with FTP. Since it doesn't have a stupid protocol I can easily tunnel it as required.
Why is the fact that it is "old" considered to be a problem ? Anyone who thinks new=good, old=bad is way out of step.
Far better to talk about what features it lacks. Or if you're trying to defend it, talk about its stability record. Have filesystems really advanced, since journalling became the standard way to do things, in any specific way that benefits regular users ?
Many have fallen into the trap of building "intelligent" cache systems that perform worse than the "dumb" cache systems. Remember, every MB of RAM caching an app that you might use is not caching part of the photo that you are editing; caching is subtle work.
The OS implementation is badly broken if it starves applications of memory in order to provide disk cache. I doubt it's that bad.
Certainly in Linux, especially with memory mapped files, the distinction between cache and memory allocated to an application is quite blurred.
We'll be pining for more of those amazing images until the James Webb launches in 2013.
You'll be pining a lot longer than that. The James Webb telescope will operate in the infrared spectrum. It won't take "visible" pictures, although the pictures can probably be colorized afterwards.
1) What is the chance of a false positive with this system? i.e. what is the chance that it might think I am someone they are looking for?
The chance exists, because I am one of those people. In 2005 I was visiting New York for a week with my girlfriend. I'd visited the US several times before with no hassles, it didn't occur to me that the heightened security measures might pose a problem.
After my fingerprints were scanned at the US immigration point in JFK, the rather ignorant and not overly friendly DHS official told me that the computer informed him I was for "special attention" and that I must follow him. He put my passport and green visa waiver form into a bright red envelope and took me down the hallway to this rather dingy room at the back, and told me to wait there. I politely asked if I could have a moment to explain the situation to my gf, but he refused and told me to just wait. There were rows of seats with lots of people, clearly of many different nationalities, waiting to be processed. At the front of the room was a raised desk with three or four DHS officials, tapping away at computers and slowly working their way through the files, calling people up to the desk. I went up to the desk to listen.
Some of the people being called up were told that they had violated the visa waiver conditions on their last stay - ie they'd stayed in the country for less than 90 days, or they'd failed to hand in the green visa waiver slip that lets them know you've left. At that point I began to get scared. What if my slip had got lost by the airlines on my last visit, and they thought I'd outstayed my welcome ? I'd have been shipped right back home. While I was contemplating this, more and more people were getting processed. Some were getting through, others were not; in particular they'd caught a guy who apparently had drug convictions. They allowed him in the country but arranged a court hearing which would hear the case for his ongoing residence. In many of the cases the DHS officials were speaking with quite stern and unfriendly voices, which was somewhat intimidating. I was wondering what could have happened. I'm squeaky clean and don't have so much as a parking ticket to my name. I've never been arrested or even spoken to strongly by the cops.
Finally, after around an hour and a half, they got to my folder, and called me up. The guy tapped his computer for a few minutes, then handed me my passport, gave a friendly smile, and told me I was free to go on. I took a risk and asked nicely, what had happened ? He explained that the fingerprint scanning system flags it up when fingerprints look similar to someone who is not supposed to be in the country, and whenever this happened it was checked and recorded. He assured me that it should not happen again.
At the time I was quite shocked and almost made up my mind never to return to the USA again. My poor gf was waiting outside the whole time - there was nobody to ask what had happened to me, she didn't know if I was going to get out or if I'd been deported or what. Surely they could have found a way for people to hook up with the rest of their group and explain things, so that they could wait back while the background checks were done ?
It's important to remember that the first commercial fusion reactors that come out of this project, if it is successful, will be using the D-T fuel cycle rather than the D-D fuel cycle; this requires lithium to keep it fuelled, and produces radioactive waste.
It will be better than the current fission reactors but is still a step away from the dream of a reactor powered solely by seawater which produces no waste. I don't expect that dream to be fulfilled until the next generation, which is probably unlikely within the lifetimes of any current Slashdot readers.
What I'm saying is this: since, even if recounts must be requested every time, a permanent voter-verified paper trail (and a true comprehensive system with regular audits and comparisons between paper vote counts and tabulations) solves almost everything, why are we instead trying to essentially unseat established, commercial enterprise e-voting vendors?
You guys are totally missing the point.
Why would anyone ask for a recount ? Two reasons :
(a) the vote is really close and people feel there might have been an error. (with electronic voting this should not happen, no two recounts will generate different results. If they do, something REALLY weird is going on..
(b) A number of people feel that their vote was not recorded correctly.
Consider case B. On an electronic voting system, where votes are recorded anonymously, how can you prove that the vote recorded matches the vote that was actually cast ?
by paid mouthpieces it is insulting. "The terrorists are cheering the Democrats on", "The Democrats want us to lose", "If the Democrats win, we will lose the war on terror", "The future of civilization rests in the balance of the election" Give me a break, both parties are pro-America and want the best for us, they just differ on how to get there. To suggest otherwise is fear-mongering of the worst kind.
Well, it worked in 2004. They're hoping it will work again.
Virtualization does not change the fact that Microsoft is retiring its old OSs and that they are no longer supported, so I don't think you're right there. The app will be unsupported whether it runs on a virtual box, or natively.
It *does* let you run old OSs on newer hardware though.
Slashdot Mirror
(2) End up supporting two revision systems, because you can't ditch the old one without destroying your software's history.
It depends on how you play it. Git is capable of importing CVS/SVN history. I've never tried it, but since CVS essentially has a linear development line for each branch I don't think this is technically difficult to achieve.
If it's a commercial tool, it's not that hard to merge all your branches (resolving the conflicts is not important) and then write a script which exports all of your release labels/tags from your existing revision control system into a single flat history in the new system, and then recreate all the branches ready for development to resume.
But it's certainly better to choose the right system up front. And I agree that it's a mistake for people to migrate without a long-term business case being made; but if that case is there, then there's no dispute.
It looks a bit like you're trying to summarize a very complex issue into a few soundbites.
The biggest cost you're going to have with your source control package is the initial setup.
This depends very much on the project. The initial setup cost of the SCM package will be pretty close to zero if everyone is using it from the start and is familiar with how it works.
The costs of revision control depend very much on the system used, and how mature the software development processes and methodologies are (purchasing the tool, installing it, and sending an email around to say "use it" are not sufficient to create a stable SCM environment), and how well the tool integrates with those processes. I would say that Clearcase is an example of a system which costs very little when you set it up initially, but which will consume a considerable amount of resources to keep it running and make sure that people don't screw it up. Subversion and Mercurial are less expensive in that respect, but Subversion will creak on a very large project with lots of branching and merging, and the inability to track merges is a real downer for any serious project (although I know they've fixed it lately). Git is technically far superior to Mercurial or Subversion, but the learning curve and the complexity of the tool - some stuff should be obvious just isn't - will increase costs when people spend ages trying to work out what just happened, or how to do what they want.
The tool that squares all of these circles the best, to me, is Bitkeeper. There is a cost, but once you understand the business case behind tools like this you will see that the commercial tools are often very cheap considering what they can do for you. Unfortunately, a lot of software development managers still regard SCM as an unfortunate nuisance that they are forced to deal with, rather than something that enables, complements, and enhances a smoothly run project.
The idea that the initial setup of an SCM is the biggest cost is quite easy to disprove. Just visit a site where people have deployed Clearcase and they don't understand how to use it, and you'll see what I mean.
The biggest benefit you're going to get from your source control package is going to be minimizing that cost.
I'm sorry, but this remark is nonsensical. The biggest benefit from deploying a source control package is minimizing the cost of that deployment ? That makes no sense.
There are many huge benefits to revision control. Change control and tracking, build reproducibility, automated merge management, parallel development, etc etc etc. Those are all things which save money and/or allow you to more easily manage large software projects which in turn allow you to compete. A poor choice in revision control can cause you to lag behind your competitors. It's a critical decision for a software project. It's different in the open source world, but since you're talking about people getting paid to write code I assume that is not what you are talking about.
Choose any of the modern source control packages and just get on with what you're being paid to do: write code.
Bad or ill-informed choices, particularly a choice based on the initial setup cost, will inhibit your ability to write code. But you are absolutely right if you mean that the tool should be essentially transparent, until the day comes when you need it's capabilities.
Which leads me back to a favourite point of mine. Why bother with the stupid, expensive and badly maintained machines in the first place ?
Here in the UK, you go to vote. They give you a piece of paper with the candidates on it. You go to a private booth and you write "X" beside the one you want. The nationwide results of the entire election are known within 24 hours of the polls closing. During the count, all of the elected representatives are permitted to attend and observe the count taking place, a process which is done in their full view. Votes which are disputed, ie not marked clearly with an X, are agreed on by the electoral officer in conjunction with the candidates present. If the candidates dissent from the unanimous view of what the ballot paper was declaring, then it goes to court.
I just do not know why you guys have to make a simple thing so complicated. Hanging chads, dimpled chads, improperly aligned machines, counting errors which may or may not be noticeable. People queueing for >30 minutes to vote. These are all the signs of a tin-pot democracy. You cannot call yourself a champion of democracy if you fail to legislate and invest for the democratic process to operate properly.
A machine that reads/speaks or writes/marks a paper ballot is invaluable to help the mobility or visually impaired and the illiterate and it can reduce costs in multi-precinct polling places or in polling places that use more than one language.
Assuming that the machine is incapable of error in all cases, which is close to being an impossibility.
A separate vote-tally machine can greatly speed up the vote count.
So why do American elections seem to take so long before the result is known ?
However, you must have a human-readable piece of paper, plastic, or something else we call a ballot in case the vote need to be recounted by hand, and this ballot must be examinable by the voter before he makes his vote official.
If you need to have a ballot in order to have confidence in the result, then why bother with electronic voting in the first place ? What are the criteria for discarding the electronic result and counting the ballots instead ? And how do you get confidence that a software bug or interference will not result in an incorrect vote being recorded for the electronic count, even though the correct vote is recorded on paper ?
Yeah, a carbon tax would do a good job of stopping power companies from ever building more power plants, limiting supply, thus since our demand is not increasing, the rates are going to go up, making all of our electricity more expensive.
That's right. The cost is being held artificially low because the price of keeping the air clean isn't being factored in.
FWIW my upbringing was Catholic as well.
It's not hard to go looking for examples of injustice, eg the Magdalene Laundries, an equivalent to what Scientology calls the RPF. Like Scientology, it appears that the RC church in Ireland essentially used slave labour as a source of revenue.
If you listen to hardcore Catholics talking about Padre Pio, miracles, and all the rest of it, you're only slightly less crazy than the Scientology idiots. If you want examples of avoiding justice and manipulating the legal system, you only have to look at how the church dealt with priests who were involved in paedophilia or other horrors; they deliberately moved priests around in order to avoid getting them caught, and they did not hand them over to the authorities - just like Scientology did not hand over those complicit in Lisa McPherson's death.
Of course, Catholicism does not require you to pay a fee to see the scripture. Anyone can freely copy, edit and recirculate their texts. Catholicism, in this respect, is not a scam. In many communities here in Ireland individual priests have actually worked to make their communities better and, during times when not many people were educated (or in possession of the right to vote) they were the leaders of the community.
No, because other devices are banned as well, not just cellphones. Anyway, why would the airlines concern themselves with the inability of cellphone base stations to handle this supposed problem ?
It does seem unlikely that a cellphone would knock out the avionics computer, especially considering that the computer has to deal with all kinds of more exotic radiation sources when it's higher up in the atmosphere. I'd be surprised if avionics equipment were not surrounded by a faraday cage to start with.
Over here, the newspaper ads (and Ebay) are full of Nintendo Wii's being sold for double the market price. I suspect that a significant number of the Wiis sold in the three months prior to Christmas have gone to people who are holding them back and taking advantage of those who will pay any price to get one before Christmas.
I suspect after Christmas the price on the Wii will collapse, and the shortages will magically disappear.
Nah, he's too busy playing dice.
CDs are convenient that you can play carpet hockey with them and still get a reasonable output, but that "error correction" is just approximating and filling gaps.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG.
"Error correction" means just that - the errors are corrected. Which means that once the process is complete, you get a datastream without any errors in it.
It is not error interpolation. I don't know whether the CD standard mandates that interpolation must take place if an erroneous stream is passed through - somehow I doubt it.
It's a shame that people are putting out such unmitigated nonsense.
"Portability is no longer any reason to stick with CDs,
Compared with MP3 players, this is true. But then again, vinyl falls down on that one.
and neither is audio quality. Although vinyl purists are ripe for parody, they're right about one thing: Records can sound better than CDs.
"Sound better" is a purely subjective concept, so in that respect it is true.
What LP quite objectively and measurably cannot do is accurately reproduce a recorded sound with ruler-flat frequency response, unmeasurable wow and flutter, and no surface noise, scratches or hisses.
Although CDs have a wider dynamic range, mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war.
If they're encouraged to do it on CDs, then why wouldn't they do it on LPs as well to get the same benefit ?
Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound.
Making a sweeping statement about the standard of reproduction of an audio medium based on the treatment that some recording companies give to some types of CD is really pushing the boat out. CDs can sound very very bad, but that is only if the record companies choose to allow them to do so. LPs can also sound very very bad, given the fact that they degrade each time they are played, catch dust and so on, ignoring the measurable crapness of their audio reproduction. Until relatively recently all recording tapes had to be heavily compressed at the low end in order to ensure they would play properly on home record decks and to ensure that the cutting lathe would not overheat.
Another reason for vinyl's sonic superiority is that no matter how high a sampling rate is, it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove, Nyquist's theorem to the contrary."
The author obviously never heard of "frequency response" or "noise floor"; the quiet sounds that manage to make it onto an LP recording are masked by the surface noise and distortion inherent in a mechanical pickup being dragged through stamped bits of plastic.
In the old days of cassette tapes, I could throw all my tapes in a big pile and still be fairly confident they would play (unless I left them out in the sun or something).
Yeah, but how many times did you suffer from chewed tape ? I've an old cassette tape here (the soundtrack for Kubrick's "The Shining") which actually appears to suffer from sticky-shed syndrome, ie the binding on the tape is sticky and it clings to the heads on the way past.
The problem with tapes and LPs is that playing them involved mechanical contact, so each time you listen to them you're wearing away the underlying media. Eventually tapes will degrade or even snap, LPs degrade continuously and can be warped or otherwise damaged if they're not properly stored. CD guarantees that if you handle and store the medium properly and keep it in it's case when not in use, it will last a lifetime and still play as good as it did the day it was bought. LP and tape cannot provide the same guarantee.
Maybe music piracy wouldn't be so prevalent if CDs were more durable.
Oh nonsense, there is no widespread perception that CDs are not durable. Music piracy exists because people don't want to pay for their music.
Also, they were mostly encoded at the studio in 16 bit,
That's not what the problem was. CD is 16-bit anyway. I have some great-sounding CDs from the early 1980s which recorded and mastered digitally, they're still fantastic.
I remain to be convinced that anyone can perceive a difference in quality between 16 bit/44.1khz and the higher bitrates and sampling rates available these days. It should be pretty easy to prove - rip the audio from an SACD, dither it down to 16bit/44.1khz, and do a double-blind test to see if a difference can be perceived.
Better than tapes, but not as good as records on a decent hi-fi.
Records have never sounded remotely good to those of us who like our music without lots of scratches, pops, ticks and surface noise in it.
It comes back to the overriding question. Why don't they show their ideas in public ? Instead they run away and hide. They won't explain how it works. They didn't publish their ideas in a scientific journal, they published in the mass media.
This thing is a massive hoax.
Do any other slashdotters feel, like myself, that this device is a bit of a damp squib given that FTP is somewhat obsolete ? HTTP provides upload as well as download capabilities, and in any tests I've done I get the same download speed as with FTP. Since it doesn't have a stupid protocol I can easily tunnel it as required.
Why is the fact that it is "old" considered to be a problem ? Anyone who thinks new=good, old=bad is way out of step.
Far better to talk about what features it lacks. Or if you're trying to defend it, talk about its stability record. Have filesystems really advanced, since journalling became the standard way to do things, in any specific way that benefits regular users ?
Many have fallen into the trap of building "intelligent" cache systems that perform worse than the "dumb" cache systems. Remember, every MB of RAM caching an app that you might use is not caching part of the photo that you are editing; caching is subtle work.
The OS implementation is badly broken if it starves applications of memory in order to provide disk cache. I doubt it's that bad.
Certainly in Linux, especially with memory mapped files, the distinction between cache and memory allocated to an application is quite blurred.
We'll be pining for more of those amazing images until the James Webb launches in 2013.
You'll be pining a lot longer than that. The James Webb telescope will operate in the infrared spectrum. It won't take "visible" pictures, although the pictures can probably be colorized afterwards.
1) What is the chance of a false positive with this system? i.e. what is the chance that it might think I am someone they are looking for?
The chance exists, because I am one of those people. In 2005 I was visiting New York for a week with my girlfriend. I'd visited the US several times before with no hassles, it didn't occur to me that the heightened security measures might pose a problem.
After my fingerprints were scanned at the US immigration point in JFK, the rather ignorant and not overly friendly DHS official told me that the computer informed him I was for "special attention" and that I must follow him. He put my passport and green visa waiver form into a bright red envelope and took me down the hallway to this rather dingy room at the back, and told me to wait there. I politely asked if I could have a moment to explain the situation to my gf, but he refused and told me to just wait. There were rows of seats with lots of people, clearly of many different nationalities, waiting to be processed. At the front of the room was a raised desk with three or four DHS officials, tapping away at computers and slowly working their way through the files, calling people up to the desk. I went up to the desk to listen.
Some of the people being called up were told that they had violated the visa waiver conditions on their last stay - ie they'd stayed in the country for less than 90 days, or they'd failed to hand in the green visa waiver slip that lets them know you've left. At that point I began to get scared. What if my slip had got lost by the airlines on my last visit, and they thought I'd outstayed my welcome ? I'd have been shipped right back home. While I was contemplating this, more and more people were getting processed. Some were getting through, others were not; in particular they'd caught a guy who apparently had drug convictions. They allowed him in the country but arranged a court hearing which would hear the case for his ongoing residence. In many of the cases the DHS officials were speaking with quite stern and unfriendly voices, which was somewhat intimidating. I was wondering what could have happened. I'm squeaky clean and don't have so much as a parking ticket to my name. I've never been arrested or even spoken to strongly by the cops.
Finally, after around an hour and a half, they got to my folder, and called me up. The guy tapped his computer for a few minutes, then handed me my passport, gave a friendly smile, and told me I was free to go on. I took a risk and asked nicely, what had happened ? He explained that the fingerprint scanning system flags it up when fingerprints look similar to someone who is not supposed to be in the country, and whenever this happened it was checked and recorded. He assured me that it should not happen again.
At the time I was quite shocked and almost made up my mind never to return to the USA again. My poor gf was waiting outside the whole time - there was nobody to ask what had happened to me, she didn't know if I was going to get out or if I'd been deported or what. Surely they could have found a way for people to hook up with the rest of their group and explain things, so that they could wait back while the background checks were done ?
It's important to remember that the first commercial fusion reactors that come out of this project, if it is successful, will be using the D-T fuel cycle rather than the D-D fuel cycle; this requires lithium to keep it fuelled, and produces radioactive waste.
It will be better than the current fission reactors but is still a step away from the dream of a reactor powered solely by seawater which produces no waste. I don't expect that dream to be fulfilled until the next generation, which is probably unlikely within the lifetimes of any current Slashdot readers.
What I'm saying is this: since, even if recounts must be requested every time, a permanent voter-verified paper trail (and a true comprehensive system with regular audits and comparisons between paper vote counts and tabulations) solves almost everything, why are we instead trying to essentially unseat established, commercial enterprise e-voting vendors?
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You guys are totally missing the point.
Why would anyone ask for a recount ? Two reasons :
(a) the vote is really close and people feel there might have been an error. (with electronic voting this should not happen, no two recounts will generate different results. If they do, something REALLY weird is going on
(b) A number of people feel that their vote was not recorded correctly.
Consider case B. On an electronic voting system, where votes are recorded anonymously, how can you prove that the vote recorded matches the vote that was actually cast ?
What is the point in evaluating voter machine software, source code or otherwise ?
There is no way to prove that the software evaluated was actually the exact software deployed on the machine.
Democratic electronic voting is an impossibility. You cannot do it.
by paid mouthpieces it is insulting. "The terrorists are cheering the Democrats on", "The Democrats want us to lose", "If the Democrats win, we will lose the war on terror", "The future of civilization rests in the balance of the election"
Give me a break, both parties are pro-America and want the best for us, they just differ on how to get there. To suggest otherwise is fear-mongering of the worst kind.
Well, it worked in 2004. They're hoping it will work again.
Virtualization does not change the fact that Microsoft is retiring its old OSs and that they are no longer supported, so I don't think you're right there. The app will be unsupported whether it runs on a virtual box, or natively.
It *does* let you run old OSs on newer hardware though.
Sorry, but that thing is no patch on the large flying pancake things that attacked Spock and exposed his emotional side in a gruelling climax.
If I can't have that, can I have the Crystalline Entity ?